


To the Sage-Instructed Eye Unfold the Various Twines of Light

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [17]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Age, Coda, Gen, Growing Old Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 12:39:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13570770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Confronted by mortality, Thomas Nightingale comes to realize a new understanding of history, and of love. [Coda to the 'Faceless Man Arc' of this AU, Thomas's POV.]





	To the Sage-Instructed Eye Unfold the Various Twines of Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zoya1416](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/gifts).



*

Two weeks after the death of the Faceless Man, Thomas Nightingale came back into the Folly close to midnight to find a light still on in the mundane library, and Abdul Walid sitting with his back against the leg of a handsome wooden table, a half-full bookcase looming above him as Molly silently withdrew with a tea-tray full of empty cups.

It had been a long day, Thomas reflected, as he leaned against the doorway, not wanting to disturb; he had been out chasing down a report of an infestation of brownies on Hampstead Heath for several hours, and had nearly forgotten that today was the day when Abdul had been due to take final delivery of his library of medical texts. It had clearly been a busy day at the Folly, too; vast amounts of material would have to have been weeded out of obscure collections to make available the space Abdul would need, and while Thomas wasn’t dismayed by their loss he was less sanguine about the fact that Abdul, only lately cleared to be out of his bed at UCH, had clearly had a longer day of it still. Walid had taken a month to recover from Chorley’s previous attempt on his life; this new recovery was more secure simply for knowing that none of them were in danger from him again, but Thomas still worried over the state of him, over the exhaustion that gripped them all at inopportune moments, at the times when their relief tipped over into passivity.

This seemed to be one of them, with Abdul sitting in silence, a book half-closed over his hand in his lap and his reading glasses tangled in the fingers of his other hand. Still, Thomas held onto the quietude that was simply seeing him alive, when there had been so many days recently when he hadn’t had that certainty to hold onto.

He had been grateful for Peter in those quick and busy days, gently and admiringly so. It was Peter who had stepped carefully into the muddy footprints the squaddies had already left in the mess that was left of Abdul’s garden at Albert St and gone poking through the sucking dirt – always making sure to keep the scene as clean as possible for whatever forensics would eventually get access to the site – and, squatting, the boot cast around his foot being rendered filthy by the mire, bagged and tagged the twisted band of silver which he would instantly return to Nightingale, leaving him to do with it what he wished (he had given it back to Abdul at the first opportunity, the first time Abdul was awake again, thinking it would restore every memory of it before it was defiled). It was Peter who managed to run rings around the investigation by CPS when Abdul gave his statement and they all found out that they owed a lot more to Lesley May than they were comfortable admitting; it was Peter who, with political skills Thomas both approved of (because it meant he was learning) and found slightly terrifying (because when on earth had the young man become so adept at wrangling rivers), managed to bury the whole affair in incomprehensible police reports and cover-up news stories about a gas explosion, and even came straight-backed and grimly grinning out of the commissioner’s office, completely unscathed.

Thomas thought he loved Peter, a little, in those days. Part of it was gratitude, and part of it was envy, but at its base it was something elastic and encompassing, a deep affection that threatened to become dependency.

It felt like watching Abdul had felt, and that’s what brought him up short, and impressed upon him the fact that of all things – for a man old before his time, and now old in spite of it – it was youth that he seemed to hanker after, in an almost unseemly fashion, as though he had something of a lust for it.

His experience of watching Abdul was wide-ranging, covering years and miles. Early on, when he was still getting used to the presence in his life of a pushy young Scottish so-and-so, he had looked on with interest as Abdul showed Molly diagrams of anatomical precision in the Folly’s kitchen, pointing tonsils and frenulums and palates out of textbooks (Molly having taken a natural interest in that particular part of the human body, and how she differed from it). He had watched with concern the grinding schedule that appeared to be the lot of any doctor completing three years as a junior, with its skipped meals and fatigue and increasingly desperate insistence that one day, it would be Over and Better; once that difficult phase had passed, he had watched with what he later realized was quiet pride as Abdul prepared to give his first lectures and tutorials, professing his own confidence and true belief that Walid would be a teacher of no small ability and charm. He was proven right, despite the slight tightness that nervousness had given to Abdul’s smile in the first few weeks as an instructor, and was happy to bear witness to his prescience when, on occasion, he slipped into the back of handsome Victorian lecture halls and watched Abdul field questions or conduct demonstrations, telling himself that he was just filling up idle time before they could proceed on to the Folly-related matter of the day rather than taking pleasure in the real skill and firm encouragement of young minds that was on display.

(Thomas enjoyed those visits to UCH even more in the 90s, when Abdul became quick to register his presence, and never failed to acknowledge him in some way despite the curious eyes of students who, if they had the energy to care, might have wondered why their tutor tolerated the presence of a man off the street in their halls.)

He’d watched Abdul lose his parents, one not long after the other, and was surprised at how thoroughly he had forgotten what grief looked like, and felt like, for someone other than himself. He had kept his own impulses to mourn the dead tightly tamped down, or, more accurately, had simply never reached back for them once they had, in the decades after the war, faded slowly away. He had learned on their trip to Scotland that Abdul’s father was, in some ways, already dead to the world when the millennium turned; that it was Mrs Wilson who would pass first, in 2008, was a shock he didn’t know quite how to mitigate. On the end of a brief telephone conversation, Abdul had disappeared up north for more than a week; Thomas had dithered as to whether to follow, and when he finally managed to scold himself thoroughly enough to make his own way to Oban, he was greeted by a half-empty house and Abdul and Christine already reeling halfway back to composure, not saying much because neither of them knew what to say. Thomas took comfort for himself, through the thick and confusing shroud of his concern, in the way Abdul stayed close to him during the remainder of the agonizing period of wake and chaos and windswept burial, each of his touches making clear, however unthinking, that he was feeling something akin to gladness to have Thomas with him.

It was only when they were back in London, when Abdul was close to his usual self and Thomas had a moment to reflect, that Thomas realized what had really kept him away from the Wilson home was fear. He had flinched away from the spectre of death, he knew, and in some small way, he despised himself for it, because it felt like the height of hypocrisy. Having been spoiled for so long by his unexpected youth, he now found himself shamefacedly jealous of it, covetous, realizing that he had even, occasionally, even if unconsciously, believed that it was all that mattered. That it was what made life bearable.

Perhaps that was true. There were ancient Greeks and medieval philosophers and later alchemists who had thought as much. Newton himself, even – in amongst the technical magic and the physics and the fractured, mathematical beams of light, he, too, had groped for the secret of the philosopher’s stone. But now, watching Abdul in the library, Thomas felt his stomach drop to think that the reality of living through immortality was not, perhaps, altogether human.

When Abdul and Peter had still been in hospital after the collapse at UCH, that same fear, he now recognized, had cast a pall over him so strong that the only way to escape it was to deny any possibility of its existence. It had worked, in fact, for a night or two, until there were only a few hours left before they were due to be safely discharged into his care, until they were both clearly out of danger and their fates would be back in his hands where they belonged and he would no longer have to be confronted with the nearness of their mortality – he had kept the fear at bay, until Beverley Brook turned up and, looking at him sitting in his horridly uncomfortable plastic chair, shook her head with something approaching pity.

“Hurts, doesn’t it,” she said, phrasing what could have been a question as fact. Her expression was calm, but Thomas sensed he had an idea of what emotion was roiling beneath. “It hurts to know there’s nothing we can do.”

“Is there not?” he asked reflexively, always in hope, still thinking there had to be a solution – he had learned that from Peter, leaving much of his habit of inactivity behind.

“If there was, d’you not think I’d’ve already told you?” Beverley said, with a thin smile. “I’ve known Abdul a long time, Nightingale. I care enough about him to want him to stay.”

“He’d give his eye teeth to know how it worked. Scientifically, that is,” Thomas found himself saying, and now their smiles for each other were more genuine (if no less helpless), recognizing their common dilemma, their common loves.

His relationship status had, somewhat to his irritation, become wider common knowledge after that near-disaster. He had laughed, though without much humor, about what Walid had told him about his dream, about the spectre of Mama Thames and Tyburn and all the rest of them gaping at the revelation of the secret Beverley already knew, that the Nightingale was something much more than a bachelor; the reality of it was far cagier, with notes of hesitation creeping into the communication he had with the docks as he continued to hunt Chorley’s ragged trail around the city. In the course of one of the necessary tête-à-têtes, he was surprised to find that it was Tyburn, in the end, who sought to understand.

“Why?” she’d simply asked, baldly, at first; when she realized he was not understanding the question, her face tightened with displeasure as she was forced to expand. “Why would you, of all people, tie yourself to the present? The last time you loved, the world took everything from you.”

He would never have expected her to be so blunt, but in a way it seemed apt, the coiling strike of a venom-laden serpent. “I notice _you_ have married, Tyburn. I do not do you the discourtesy of thinking you care less for the fate of your partner than anyone else might, including myself.”

It had been a long time since their interactions had been truly adversarial; even then, with them both quietly seething, Thomas sensed there was something she was trying to make him understand, that she was frustrated she could not express. Abruptly, she deflated; she put one long-fingered hand to her forehead, her eyes fixed on the floor.

“I warned Beverley,” she said, lowly. “I warned your little fool of a constable. I warned him that loving her would bring him nothing but grief.”

Nightingale blinked. “Is that really what you think?” he asked, and felt some small stirring of indignation inside him, some sort of hope he hadn’t realized he had previously lost. “Is that all you hope for yourself?”

She glared up at him, unmoving, her own fear painfully and physically visible.

“I’m so sorry,” he said simply, and quietly got up and left her alone.

History was the study of change, he had eventually learned. There was no beginning and no end to things, nothing predetermined, nothing that was not contingent, nothing that remained of the certainty of Hegel; after the war theories of something innate about the Germans were destroyed by the Berlin spirit, and the innateness of the Empire came crashing down in India. He, unchanging, taking comfort in stasis, believing that that was all there was and all that he needed, was the aberration. Even in the years after he had taken that incredible leap of allowing himself to acknowledge that yes, there was something about this young man, something about this Scotsman who lived so easily in so many environments, something that would make Thomas better, would make Thomas a part of the world again – even then, he was slow to realize, he had thought that his new reality would be as unchanging as the first. He would live and love on, and so would Abdul – he had said as much, he had signed his name, the fact of _them_ was filed away as proof with all the other totems of centuries’ standing – and it had been Thomas’s preference to push off the inevitable confrontation with the facts of nature that he had inexplicably cheated.

Did he have the Faceless Man to thank for his turn towards revelation? It was a curious and distasteful thought that rose up in him, as he shifted slightly in the doorway and Abdul’s eyes opened and looked over at him from where he sat, surrounded by his books. But the revelation was not, in the end, one he had failed to comprehend – just one he had failed to think on. It felt easy to accept that he had known for some time that he would take his fortune for granted only at his own peril.

It was, after all, true. He _had_ been dragged back into the world, and had been guided through it for almost thirty years by the very best of hands, and learned something new with every passing year about how love worked, and why, and he would never think of any moment of it as anything less than entirely worthwhile. Real time worked in fragments, always advancing, only very rarely surging up into catastrophe; in the here and now he lived in a world where the Faceless Man was just the monster of the hour, and his husband had performed magic, and he and his apprentice would go on changing things he had never had the capacity to think could change at all.

Abdul gestured to the bookcase, unfolding his glasses and putting them back on with his other hand. “Peter and I thought this arrangement would suit, but I can find a place for them elsewhere if you’d rather, or wait until I’ve got an office again.”

“Not at all,” Thomas said, rousing himself from his reverie as he advanced into the room and squatted down on his heels, reaching out to the nearest stack so he could help with alphabetizing. “Is this the last of them?”

“For the moment,” Abdul said, turning down the corner of the page he had been consulting before putting the volume onto the shelf. “I can’t say I’m much inclined to move them again, at any rate.”

“Good thing there’s no need to, then,” Thomas said, smiling; he was preoccupied enough for a moment with deciphering the order of several consonant-rich Polish authors that it took him longer than he normally might have to realize Abdul hadn’t replied, and he looked up to find a curious look on Walid’s face, as though he was feeling both fond and pained. “What?”

Abdul seemed hesitant, which was odd, because he rarely had trouble asking whatever questions needed to be asked. “Are you sure you want me to live here?”

“Whyever wouldn’t I?” Thomas said, frowning. He didn’t begrudge the fact that Abdul was certain to miss Albert St, and not just for the independence it had given him – he knew all too well, after living in the Folly for so many decades, that a home well lived-in was something personal and intimate, its rhythms and quirks and comforts not easily given up – but from the look on Abdul’s face, this was not about something so understandable as that.

Abdul put another tome down on his lap; he rested his hands upon it, rather like he was about to deliver a lecture, or impart a proposal, though his expression remained calm. “I’ve had rather a lot of time to think, recently,” he said, letting slip just a hint of a smile at the idea of talking about anything to do with the previous few weeks as a banality, “and it’s occurred to me that I rather failed to comply with the terms of our agreement. In fact, I’m not sure it’s even possible for me to do so, given – well. Given what nearly happened.”

He waited for an answer, and Thomas waited too. He could have answered immediately – every fibre of him was ready, readier than he’d ever been, to deny the very premise of Abdul’s implied question – but he waited, because he knew that to respect Abdul’s concern he would have to at least hint that he had given it proper consideration.

“Sod the agreement,” he said, shaking his head, and turned to put another stack of journals on the shelves before picking up a few more, flipping them over in his hands, letting Abdul’s relief play out in relative privacy.

 _I think I understand you_ , Abdul had said once. _But I have no intention of leaving your life in any way, Thomas Nightingale_.

Abdul had still seemed – still _been_ – so young when he had said that, so sure, so determined in the face of whatever time would throw at him. Now it had been thrown, and his faith had been shaken, and so it was Thomas who would be sure to pick it up and carry it with them, whatever was to come.

He didn’t know the words needed to say as much, but he would live them out, for as long as time would give them.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Voila, a little coda to the end of the Faceless Man Arc; it's also sort of a follow-up to [a little piece I put up on my blog](http://akathecentimetre.tumblr.com/post/168638740537/walid-gives-up-and-moves-into-the-folly-not) a few weeks ago (I've also filled a few more _Rivers of London_ prompts over there, if anyone's interested). In other news, I've attempted another gifset for this series, featuring Ben Daniels (again) as Walid and a touch of Paul McGann as Nightingale; you can see that [here](http://akathecentimetre.tumblr.com/post/170505316906/the-gentlemans-agreement-series-ben-daniels-as).
> 
> My well of plot bunnies has run _very_ dry for this series, I have to say - but I still adore them, ack! If anyone has ideas for this or, indeed, for any other Nightingale/Walid scenarios, I am all ears. Thanks for reading, guys.  <3


End file.
